This paper estimates, using a large panel data set from rural Bangladesh, the effects of health shocks on household consumption and how access to microcredit affects households’ response to such shocks. Our results suggest that even though in general consumption remains stable in many cases when households are exposed to health shocks, households that have access to microcredit appear to cope (...

Discrete choice models have been widely estimated on scanner panel data to study consumer choice. One challenge in scanner panel research is that only the prices of the items bought are recorded. The ad hoc models used to fill in the missing prices of non-purchased brands may create a self-selection bias in estimating consumer price sensitivities. This type of bias is also present in existing s...

The aim of this work is to introduce a new econometric methodology for multioutput production frontiers. In the context of a system of frontier equations, we use a flexible multivariate distribution for the inefficiency error term. This multivariate distribution is constructed through a copula function which allows for separate modelling of the marginal inefficiency distributions and the depend...

Increasing evidence from the empirical economic and psychological literature suggests that positive and negative well-being are more than opposite ends of the same phenomenon. Two separate measures of the dependent variable may be needed when analyzing the determinants of subjective well-being. We argue that this conclusion reflects in part the use of too restrictive econometric models. A flexi...

Job Satisfaction and Co-worker Wages: Status or Signal? This paper uses matched employer-employee panel data to show that individual job satisfaction is higher when other workers in the same establishment are better-paid. This runs contrary to a large literature which has found evidence of income comparisons in subjective well-being. We argue that the difference hinges on the nature of the refe...

Our analysis of 19 OECD countries over the period 1972-2006 provides evidence of convergence in per capita health care expenditures for 17 countries, while the US and (to a lesser degree) Norway follow a different path. A simple decomposition of per capita health expenditures reveals that the divergence of the US comes from the divergence of the ‘health care expenditure over GDP’ component, whi...

We examine convergence in carbon dioxide emissions among 128 countries for the period 1960-2003 by means of a new methodology introduced by Phillips and Sul (Econometrica, 2007). Contrary to previous studies, our approach allows us to examine for evidence of club convergence, i.e. identify groups of countries that converge to different equilibria. Our results suggest convergence in per capita C...

In this study we use historical emission data from installations under the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) to evaluate the impact of this policy on industrial greenhouse gas emissions during the first two trading phases (2005-2012). As such the analysis seeks to disentangle two causes of emission abatement: that attributable to the EU ETS and that attributable to the economic c...

This paper investigates gender differences in the spatial mobility of young adults when initially leaving their parental home. Using individual data from 11 waves (2000-2010) of the SOEP we examine whether female home leavers in East Germany move across greater distances than males and whether these differences are explained by the gender gap in education. Our results reveal that female home le...

The paper analyzes the effect of incentives regulation, when the yardstick competition approach is supplemented with a performance tax on providers. In an application to prospective payments in health care in the U.S. and Japan, we show differential effects of value-based purchasing, when price-setting is related to benchmark values of quality measures or length-of-stay. The predictions of our ...